Island tribes in India may be Asia's closest link to Africa

Two tribes living on India's Andaman islands may be direct descendents of the earliest modern humans who moved out of Africa 70,000 years ago, scientists reported last week.

Scientists at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad said these two tribes could be the oldest surviving human stock in Asia, and their research may overturn the reigning theory on early human migration.

Most scientists believe that all populations today are descendants of modern humans who migrated out of East Africa about 70,000 years ago to replace early humans elsewhere.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2005/05/16/2003254945

It's such a shame these tribes are dying out and getting assimilated. They would provide excellent study for anthropologists and geneticists.

I also wonder what sort of dialect the people on the island speak.

those tribes probably speak a language, not a "dialect."

A dialect is a subvariety of a language, as in the Scottish dialect of English or the Swiss dialect of German, and while I realize you had no such intention, you should know that traditionally, colonialists (and white settlers in North America) have belittled the languages of indigenous peoples by calling them "dialects."

You wouldn't refer to European languages as "dialects" unless you were referring to one of the regional sub-varieties, like Langue d'Oc French or Galician Spanish.

Whatever the people on those islands speak, it is probably not related to anything else, so it can't be a dialect, although it may have its own dialects.